A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunications services, and more particularly to a method and system for providing information about telecommunications services.
B. Background of the Invention
Telecommunications service providers offer a variety of accessory telephone services to enhance the basic capability of connecting callers on the system. Such services include messaging services, call waiting, caller identification, electronic mail (email), facsimile, etc. Users (i.e. customers of the telecommunications service providers) typically subscribe to such telephone services and use the services from a plain old telephone set. The telephone services offered by the telecommunications service providers may replace similar services offered by other sources that may require the use of special equipment.
For example, users of messaging services such as voice mail no longer need special message machines to receive and store messages. In addition, voice mail allows users to communicate audio messages in a manner similar to written communications. With voice mail systems, users receive messages in voice mailboxes that allow a user to receive, edit and forward messages to one or more mailboxes within a voice mail system.
Voice mail may be provided within a private switching system such as a private branch exchange (PBX), or it may be offered as an auxiliary service by telecommunications service providers over the general switched telephone network (GSTN). Voice mail systems operating within a PBX are private systems that are typically used only by users that work for a common organization in one or more buildings. Such private systems may require that all devices that connect to it be of selected types. One advantage of messaging services provided by telecommunications providers is that it makes voice mail available to all customers and not just to organizations or businesses using a private voice mail system. Another advantage of using messaging services provided by telecommunications providers is that many types of telecommunications devices may be used to access the services.
One problem with using messaging systems such as voice mail is that the systems lack the visual indication that message machines provide. In addition, a user may have many messages waiting to be heard at any given time. To get through all of them, the user must listen to or skip through each one sequentially. Because messages are stored in the order received, the most important messages may be separated by many unimportant messages. The voice mail systems also lack a way of searching through the messages for the most important or relevant messages. Where a telephone or voice mail is shared by several users, each user may have to listen to, or skip over messages that have been left for someone else. Currently, many voice mail systems remove any new message indications from messages that have been skipped over. Other users may not receive an indication that there are messages waiting for them. In a family, for example, message machines and voice mail services are shared by all of the members of the family. If a teenage member of the family retrieves his messages from the voice mail service, each message must be listened to or skipped over in sequence before arriving to the message directed to him. As the messages that aren't for the teenage member are listened to or skipped over, the new message indication is eliminated. Thus, the other members of the family would not know that they have messages.
It would be desirable to have a system that includes the ability to search through lists of messages and to select messages for retrieval in any order without requiring a messaging machine. It would be further desirable to have a system that allows a user to select and retrieve information regarding a telephone service.
Telephone services that provide information about the calls made to the user are available. Call waiting with name and caller identification is telephone services that provide a user with the identification or the name of callers that have attempted to call a telephone having a display. The identifications (telephone numbers or names) are left on the display until cleared by the user. One problem with the call waiting with name and caller identification services is that the information provided is limited to the name or identification of a party that tried to call the user. The caller identification services do not provide any other information such as whether a caller left a message in voice mail.
It would be desirable to have a telephone service that enhances the information provided to include information from other services. For example, it would be desirable to provide a visual indication of whether a caller left a message in voice mail.